1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for creating and updating interactive 3D visualizations.
2. Description of Related Art
There are a number of conventional methods for indexing media. One popular two-dimensional method arranges hierarchically-organized content on various pages. These conventional methods utilize user interfaces with a number of hyperlinks allowing a user to navigate among the various pages. Many web pages on the Internet are organized in this fashion. FIGS. 1–4 show one example of this type of conventional index, in which training material is organized. FIG. 1 shows the highest-level organization of the media. As shown in FIG. 1, there are 9 modules, each having a hyperlink 101 that allows a user to access the structure of the module. FIG. 2 shows the tree structure 200 within module 3 that depicts the organization of the various media within the module. For instance, FIG. 2 shows leaves 204, branches 203 and root 202. Each leaf 204 of the tree links the user to a media page. Examples of the media pages 300 and 400 are shown in FIGS. 3 and 4.
FIGS. 5 and 6 show another conventional two-dimensional type of media indexing, for indexing meetings. FIG. 5. shows an application 500 that indexes raw data collected during the indexing of recorded meetings, as a table 501 in a web page 502. Each row 503 shows the properties of an index, such as author 504, a time stamp 505, a representative video image 506, a slide image 507, and/or notes 508. Each thumbnail video image 506 accesses and plays the indexed video at the time of the time stamp. Each slide thumbnail 507 accesses a larger view of an indexed slide associated with that time stamp.
FIG. 6 shows the Cscope application 600, which provides a histogram 601 that shows the book marking and note taking activity of users. When a user hovers over a mark 604 on the timeline 602 under the histogram 601, a text note 603 is displayed. Finally, clicking on a mark 604 in the timeline will play the indexed video of the meeting from that point in time.